5 ms·
On the point of anthropic computing: it is important to note that you have not accomplished any _improvement_ to your condition by killing yourself; before as a
by FeepingCreature 11y ago
On the point of anthropic computing: it is important to note that you have not accomplished any _improvement_ to your condition by killing yourself; before as after, you had found a correct solution with probability 2^-n. Anthropic computing is just "fancy guessing".
What is interesting about it to me is that the "true computational nature of reality" must be such that sufficient computation is available for you to run the _validation_ of your solution in logarithmic time an exponential number of times ("in parallel"), because otherwise you could not find yourself _at all_ in a universe where you knew you had found the correct computation. Which does make it strange that quantum physics does not seem to give us any way to "get at" all this computation that must be going on behind the scenes.
(Unless the "true nature" of reality is such that a subset of the wavefunction is being computed "for cheap". Collapse exonerated?)
- andyjohnson0 11y agoBy running the validation "in parallel", do you mean running it in each of the possible quantum "many worlds" in which validation takes place? If so, aren't you implicitly assuming that these other parallel worlds somehow draw on a shared pool of computing resource? This might be true [1], but equally there may not be a "behind the scenes" of reality at all. [1] How would we know? Run a timing attack on the underlying compute infrastructure?
- kordless 11y agoI'm leaning toward the parallel universe hypothesis as well, except I'm thinking it's more like there are part-time processes that run in parallel, do their work, then exit after they come to some type of consensus of state. It would end up looking something like a bunch of containers running a game on your computer, processing all the other player's moves, arriving at consensus, sending that consensus to a central 'compute' spot where a global consensus took place, wait for a reply, then take what the global central thing said was a valid state of things. Rinse and repeat. Stick it all in blockchain in case there's a disagreement. I keep pointing out to people I can't make their beers (including glass) disappear while we're talking at a table. That this universe doesn't allow me to hack it (and presumably keeps others from hacking it) is a nice feature.
- andyjohnson0 11y agoIf the multiverse / physical reality has a "global central thing" then it has a scaling bottleneck, and we have a problem.
- javajosh 11y agoHow is killing yourself a correct solution to anything, and what is "n" in your equation? Humans are experience integrators with the rather interesting (and unique) opportunity to "emit" the useful integrations that make it easier (or possible) for others to perform a similar integration. We do it on a personal level with children and friends; and on an impersonal level with books and papers.
- andyjohnson0 11y agoI'm not sure if you read the paper. Aaronson writes: "given a formula ϕ, guess a random assignment x, then kill yourself if x does not satisfy ϕ." In other words, the only universes in which you find yourself existing (alive) are ones in which you are in possession of a solution to ϕ, which you obtained easily by guessing. Its a not-entirely-serious riff on the Anthropic Principle [1] and maybe the "Quantum Suicide" thought experiment. It's clear to me that the meaning in the article is not that killing yourself solves life problems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
- kordless 11y agoI started watching Robert Harper's Type Theory presentations on Youtube. In the first section he mentions that suffering is part of calculation, or something similar. If you kill yourself, you are basically exiting the suffering you bear here. The question then comes whether suffering is present is all places you go. If it is, it just makes more sense to bear the suffering here and learn from it. Maybe you can learn to reduce it slightly, which will help out in your next lifetime (assumption).
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoThe problem (well, one of them) is that there is no guaranteed way of killing yourself. For any sufficiently complex problem you will end up being more likely to near fatally maim yourself in the attempt to kill yourself for an incorrect guess than you will be to make a correct guess.
- Houshalter 11y agoYou squeeze your probability mass into universes where the problem is solved, and therefore you are more likely to find yourself existing in those universes. What this means for your actual experience, is that as soon as you turn the quantum suicide machine on, you should expect to see it output a correct answer and not kill you. You can never observe the machine output an incorrect answer, nor can you observe your own death. >Which does make it strange that quantum physics does not seem to give us any way to "get at" all this computation that must be going on behind the scenes. Why should it? Also if parallel worlds can interact with each other and aren't entirely separate, then we probably wouldn't exist. The first parallel world to develop a way of taking over other parallel universes would win. The optimal self replicator that can spread through all universes would take over everything.